Mother duck not sitting on eggs as much

After sitting nearly a month on about 20 eggs, Ms. Quackette is not devoting as much during the day and wants to run around with her boyfriend and go swimming in the new duck pond I built for them.

2 weeks ago she had kicked out 2 eggs where I found them and they were ice cold so thought they would be dead if they were alive to begin with them. I candled them and saw a dark mass in both and broke them open and found 1/2 developed ducks but powerful rotten stench so they must have died. Cam a duck smell eggs that are bad and kick them out like she did?

Well, today has been a month since she started sitting on them and I was told they should hatch within 3 weeks so figured the rest are dead too and her lack of intense interest in sitting also made me think they were dead. So I picked one up and cracked it open and was horrified to hear a peeping noise and peeled off a duckling that was fully formed but still with a large yolk sack but peeping feebly and breathing. The poor thing died in a few minutes in my hand and I feel terrible having killed this little thing.

So, we got alive ducks in that pile of eggs but need to know if it is normal for mama duck to taper off the sitting as the eggs mature and does she hear the faint peeps when they are ready to come out and break the eggs free for the ducklings or do the ducklings break out themselves?

I don't have an incubator but had some folks tell me to put them on a heating pad set to low, cover them with a wool blanket, turn them every day and squirt some warm water on them every day. But if the mother duck is required to break them out, I will be killing them when they cry out for help but worried they will die from cold if I leave them in the nest with her not sitting so much.

We have warm days, up to 90 and down to 60 at night and eggs are on a sheet of hard insulation so won't draw cold from the ground.

Any suggestions would be appreciated and you can help save a bunch of ducklings. Thanks, Ray

Duck eggs take four weeks to hatch, not three, so whoever told you three weeks was mistaken. If you don't have an incubator the heating pad would be your best bet but I wouldn't expect much using that method. Ducklings need high humidity to hatch and just spraying them while they are on top of a heating pad isn't going to achieve that. The duck does not break them out of their shells and neither should you, they hatch on their own.

If you really want them to hatch you would be best off buying or borrowing an incubator. You can get inexpensive Styrofoam ones at Tractor Supply. They're not the best but if you're only going to do this the one time there's no sense in investing in an expensive, better incubator.